Though you may not realize it, your body sends you important fertility signals every day. When you learn to read them, you can achieve pregnancy more quickly and easily, and also learn to avoid unwanted pregnancy!

Though men are fertile every day of their lives and may produce trillions of sperm in a lifetime, women are born with every egg cell they will ever have, and release only about 400 eggs total during their fertile years. Generally, only one mature egg cell is released each month. It sits, waiting to meet a sperm cell, for only one to two days before dying away. The key to achieving pregnancy is to time intercourse such that sperm is united with egg on your most fertile day.

There are three methods of predicting your most fertile day: evaluating your cervical mucus, taking your basal body temperature, and judging the status of your cervix itself.

Method #1: Evaluating Your Cervical Mucus

For most women, evaluating cervical mucus is the easiest and most accurate method of detecting fertility. It requires no pencils, paper, or invasive techniques, but merely an increased awareness of monthly changes you usually ignore.

Before the release of an egg (no matter what your current personal attitude about pregnancy achievement), your body begins to prepare to welcome sperm cells by creating a friendly environment for their survival. This involves producing a substance called cervical mucus (or the perhaps-less-offensive “cervical fluid”), which nourishes sperm cells and helps them travel to the egg.

You may have noticed this fertile-quality cervical mucus at some point. It is slippery, stretchy, and clear, kind of like egg whites. It may appear in your underwear, in the toilet, or on toilet paper when you go to the bathroom. You may have mistaken it for the lubrication that appears during sexual arousal. This is easy to do, because both are clear and wet. However, fertile cervical mucus can be distinguished because it is thicker, occurs monthly and independently of sexual arousal, and does not easily dissolve in water. In water, arousal fluid will dissolve, but cervical mucus will ball up in a small mass and sink.

Cervical fluid is also difficult to distinguish from semen. For this reason, up to about a day after intercourse, you should treat any cervical mucus you observe as suspect. It may, in fact, be semen flowing out.

In the past, you may also have mistaken fertile-quality cervical fluid for the symptom of a yeast or other vaginal infection. In fact, some women may even go to the doctor or buy an over-the-counter treatment while under the mistaken assumption that this fluid is abnormal! You can save yourself discomfort, time, and money by familiarizing yourself with the normal signs of your fertility cycle.